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Pierrot's Silence

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Pierrot's Silence 132 Pierrot’s Silence Marika T. Knowles The theatrical personnage Pierrot first appeared on the French stage in the late sev- enteenth century. Beginning as a white-suited naif, his face framed by the halo of a simple straw hat, his jacket ornamented with a long row of white buttons, his shoes tied with pink bows, Pierrot would metamorphize over the course of the next two hundred years into a rail-thin mime, whose face was caked with white powder and crowned with a black skull-cap. Throughout his career on the stage, Pierrot has ex- ercised a particular fascination for visual artists, who seem compelled to represent Pierrot in their work, often at the expense of characters whose role may be of great- er narrative significance. There is something about Pierrot, and this ‘something’, I would suggest, is his silence, and the opportunity his silence creates for nervous, vi- sionary outpourings on the part of his viewers and his critics. Pierrot’s silence takes a number of different forms, each of which I will address in this essay. On the one hand, there is Pierrot’s silence as a theatrical character, and the way his visual appear- ance on stage references the silence of the work of art amidst the ‘noise’ of text-based theatre. There is also the way Watteau represents Pierrot’s silence in visual form in the large painting, Pierrot, dit Gilles (Plate V). This painting, as I show, not only represents silence, but as well is a silent object, a fragment unmoored from history, with very little in the way of text to pin it to its notoriously laconic creator, Watteau. Somewhat paradoxically – but it seems that all attempts to speak about silence are destined for paradox – this essay will try to explain what Pierrot’s silence speaks, and what, finally, it refuses to speak. Performing Silence Artists who represent theatrical characters face the challenge of translating a sonic, spatial, temporal medium into a silent and still medium. Over time, different visual conventions develop in order to signify movement and speech through specifically visual analogies. For example, Poussin’s complex texturing of the surface of his paint- ing through hand movements, varied postures, and contrasting vectors succeeds in creating the impression of noise and action. Pierrot, however, presents the unique problem of a character whose presence on stage is often, already, silent and still. Thus the artists who represent Pierrot must replicate the sonic effect of this silence and still- ness within a silent and still medium. This is not as easy as it might seem, because as 134 MARIKA T. KNOWLES PIERROT’s SILENCE 135 painting developed in France over the course of the seventeenth century, painters had This partnership between the silent performer and a speaking audience would con- wanted to avoid silence at all costs, expending great efforts in order to make painting tinue throughout Pierrot’s history as a theatrical character. Yet this relationship al- speak. Faced with a character that was more like a painting than like theatre, most ready suggests one way that viewers respond to the silence of the work of art : by artists would have recoiled. Watteau, of course, did not, because his interest in theatre imaginatively filling the work’s silence through sympathetic projection. After the was not textual, but rather, atmospheric and suggestive. Like a great white canvas heyday of the fair theatre, the Comédie Italienne was restored to its privilege as the moving about the stage, Pierrot had the potential to represent, within the theatrical Opéra Comique, and Pierrot’s role lost much of its significance.5 Like the other char- scene, the silence of visual art. As such, the different ways that audiences chose to acters, he sang couplets and danced minuets, a content valet to his flirtatious mas- interpret, and to fill Pierrot’s silence throughout his history on the French stage, give ters and mistresses. In the early nineteenth century, however, Pierrot again rose to insight into how viewers negotiated the silence of the work of art. prominence as one of the most beloved characters of the popular Parisian boulevard Let me begin, however, by noting that Pierrot was not always silent. On the stage theatre. Like the fair theatre of the early eighteenth century, the boulevard theatre of the Comédie Italienne, Pierrot could be quite voluble, telling off his master or was subject to censorship and strict controls, all intended to protect the Comédie mistress in deliciously frank terms. In this capacity, Pierrot played the traditional Française, bastion of text-based theatre. The Théâtre des Funambules, where Pierrot role of the Hofnarr. Protected by the pretence of foolishness, the clown could speak appeared, was at its inception a pantomime theatre, without rights to speech.6 As the on topics about which the other courtiers were forced to remain silent.1 While this hero of the pantomime, Pierrot never spoke a word or made a sound. Instead, the au- privilege signified Pierrot’s status as an exceptional outsider, a quality that definitely dience spoke for him, shouting encouragement from the cheap seats in the paradise, attracted Watteau to the character, there were other moments in the repertoire that shushing those chatterers who kept them from ‘hearing’ Pierrot.7 The audience was specifically aligned Pierrot with the silent work of art. One of these moments came boisterous and unruly ; sometimes they wanted to ‘listen’ to Pierrot, sometimes they in Columbine Avocat Pour et Contre, when a nearly blind painter mistakes Pierrot for wanted to fill his silence with their own words. a blank canvas and covers his face with paint. Pierrot, sobbing, cries, “he morbleau, Certainly, this was the desire of the Romantic critics who flocked to the Funam- prenez donc garde, Monsieur ; je ne suis pas le Tableau, moi”.2 bules and penned accounts of what they saw. Jules Janin, one of the most notoriously Yet Pierrot, in his capacity as a valet, standing silently beside his master, Harlequin, prolific theatre critics of the early nineteenth century, spilt gallons of ink describ- awaiting orders, would indeed have appeared like an empty canvas, awaiting the ing Pierrot and heralding the identification between “le peuple” and the mime who artist’s intervention. The sudden eruption of a canvas into the play’s intrigue would played Pierrot, Jean Gaspard, ‘Baptiste’, Deburau.8 Until Janin began writing about have referred to the traditional base of commedia dell’arte scenarios, a brief outline Deburau in the feuilleton dramatique of the Journal des Débats, Deburau was known of scenes and situations that was pinned up backstage and called a canevas.3 This only to his working-class audience. Janin gave Deburau a voice in fashionable circles, controlled form of improvisation could be compared to the creation of a painting : attracting critics like George Sand, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire to the the canevas provided a sketchy outline, akin to the charcoal sketch that preceded the Funambules. Yet Janin’s voice for Deburau was very much the critic’s own creation, a painting of a canvas, and the actors’ performance filled in the design, as colour filled strong interpretation of the mime’s silence. in the black and white sketch. Play within a restricted surface, using words, but also On 1 November 1830, Janin began his feuilleton with an account of the Comédie physical movement, underpinned the Comédie Italienne, opposing it to the linear Française’s production of Le Nègre.9 Ozanneaux’s tragedy depicts the struggles of a unfolding of a drama structured through text. slave and his son, fatally enamoured of his white soeur du lait. Brushing aside the In 1697, Louis XIV expelled the Comédie Italienne from Paris because of a ru- play’s soft philanthropy, Janin declares the subject of the play the same old “Brutus”, moured slander against Madame de Maintenon. Yet the King’s edict succeeded only but a Brutus clothed in dark skin, a wig, and a décor tropique. “Pour ma part”, Janin in silencing the troupe, whose players moved to the fair theatres, where they con- declares, “plus j’écoute ces espèces de chefs-d’oeuvres, comédies musquées, comé- tinued to perform, but without the privilege of dialogue.4 The players made a vir- dies morales, drames romantiques, drames en grands et en petits vers, et plus je suis tue, and a joke, out of the enforced silence. Bawdy physical pantomime appeared persuadé qu’il n’y a qu’un acteur vraiment comique à Paris ajourd’hui ; qu’il n’y a in lieu of spoken words, or characters would pop onto stage, deliver a line, and pop qu’un drama vraiment intéressant ; cet acteur, c’est Débureau, le Gille des Funam- off while another character appeared to speak his line in turn. Finally, placards in- bules […]”.10 scribed with dialogue descended from above the stage ; the audience would sing the Listening to text and song – “plus j’écoute” – is exactly what Janin protests against, dialogue aloud to the tune of popular vaudevilles. As a sign of their approbation, and because theatrical language has become affected and corrupt, an endless collage of their complicity, the members of the public gave the players a voice. “petites phrases entortillées, du persiflage délicat, du gros rire, des mots à double sens, 136 MARIKA T. KNOWLES PIERROT’s SILENCE 137 des allusions piquantes, des ingénuitiés sans fin […]”.11 For all the tirades of Molière, a character that stands for the visual above the textual. Pierrot’s distinctive whiteness for all the “vers croisés” of Ozanneaux, Deburau substitutes “une casaque de pail- metaphorically represents a blank page, a canvas, or canevas, as opposed to a script.
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